Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir (7 page)

Actually, the policy of rotating the preacher every few years seemed to work quite well. It kept the congregation from becoming too attached to any one personality, and it kept the preachers on their toes, knowing that they’d need a good recommendation for their next job. This was my first encounter with term limits. And it made good sense to me. The fact that neither politicians nor preachers seemed to like the idea also appealed to me.

Mom and Dad enjoyed having a good time, and people especially gravitated to Dad’s humor. Preachers were no exception. (Perhaps the possibility of getting a good deal on a used car didn’t hurt the relationship, either.) For the most part, these preachers were good men having to move their families from pillar to post in order to preach the gospel. Many of them were exceptional orators, which Dad admired. Several even had a good sense of humor. They and their families were often at our house for cookouts and ice cream made from a hand-cranked freezer. They would match my
dad story for story, recounting tales from their days on the road, like the time one preacher was invited over to a family’s house for Sunday dinner and saw Grandma, who was carrying a lower lip full of snuff, inadvertently drop a big load of it into the batch of coleslaw that she was preparing. He said he hadn’t had coleslaw since.

As I look back on those early Lawrenceburg years growing up in what some might call a fundamentalist church, I am struck by how much has stayed with me and become a part of the way that I view life, even after my “enlightened” years as a philosophy major in college and my sojourns in Washington, Hollywood, and New York. It doesn’t have so much to do with doctrine, and it certainly did not always keep me on the straight and narrow path. But my early lessons had penetrated pretty deep and had an irritating way of reasserting themselves at inconvenient times.

On a more fundamental level, the notion of sin and redemption sums up the story of mankind. We can rise to great heights ethically and morally, and we can achieve great accomplishments. There are hard-and-fast rules that we can hold on to in a constantly changing world, but we are prone to err and “miss the mark.” We must constantly work at doing the right thing.

The most important things that you learn as a child are the things that you don’t realize that you’re learning. And in my case, in later years, much of this had political significance
for me. Man’s weaknesses made necessary the checks and balances our founders were wise enough to see were needed in our system of government. This insight also gave us our system of federalism. Power in the hands of man must be dispersed. One does not have to be sold on the concept of original sin in order to conclude that we should all be more than a little modest with regard to most human endeavors. Mistakes, miscalculations, and corruption have too often accompanied the ambitions of individuals as well as governments. The nature of man and the principles that had survived the ages seemed to me to be a much more reliable yardstick than the fads and intellectual brainstorms of the day. For me, this was the essence of conservatism and still is.

Perhaps surprisingly to some, having political views based on childhood religious influences does not necessarily translate into approval of a lot of the political activities of some religious groups. In our church, we drew a clear distinction between the responsibilities of church and state. This was not a legal concept. It was one based upon scripture: “Render unto Caesar …” Jesus and the apostles were not social activists or community organizers. They were in the business of saving souls and changing hearts and minds. I found no historical evidence of the early churches organizing to change any law. To the best of my knowledge, no fund-raising scrolls have been unearthed. Their goals were much more important than that. In all those years growing up, I don’t recall
hearing one political reference ever coming from the pulpit. Members could do what they thought they should do in politics, but that was not the role of the church. Neither did the church, as such, have social welfare responsibilities. Oh, to be sure, helping one’s fellow man was encouraged, but it was an individual’s responsibility. As one old-timer put it, “If you want to join the Lions Club, they’re down the road. We’re about something different here.”

Sounds a little harsh perhaps, but in this day of mega-churches and attempts by the Left and the Right to involve their churches in activities far removed from the original role of the church, it still has resonance for that boy who shined those pews with his Sunday pants while he (mostly) watched the clock many years ago.

T
HERE ARE FEW THINGS
more heartwarming to a man than his memories of that special dog he had growing up. Romping through the fields together, playing catch, hunting birds—best pals. My fondest recollection of my dog is nothing like that. Don’t get me wrong, my dog and I had our joyous moments, as well as melancholy ones. However, when I think of him, the thought is often accompanied not by just a smile but by a laugh. And, as was so often the case, it is based on something my dad did to the utter chagrin of my sainted mother.

The story starts with a car trade. Dad was getting close to a deal when he focused on the dog sitting in the backseat. “It’s a deal if you throw in the dog,” he said. “Done,” the man replied. So I had a new dog. His name was Pooch. Obviously, his original owner had put a lot of thought into naming the dog, and it seemed to suit him fine. He was a pooch and looked like a pooch. He was a pretty big dog and
looked to be part hound, long and lanky, and part bulldog, with kind of a squished-up face but with long ears and a tongue that almost hit the ground. He was white with large black spots, and he was a beautiful sight as he loped along.

At the time, Dad was a salesman at Caperton Chevrolet and was doing pretty well. He built a house on Caperton Avenue, which was the street that the boss lived on, although at the other end of the street in a much larger house. As always, our circumstances reflected the vicissitudes of the economy and the car business, and this was a little more upscale than the houses we usually had. We bought a TV but we had no air-conditioning, so on hot summer nights we would put the TV in the window and watch it through the screen as we sat in the yard. In other words, we were thoroughly enjoying our new neighborhood. Little did we know that scandal was about to upset it all.

One summer day, Dad was painting our metal lawn chairs in the front yard. Painting them a bright yellow. Pooch was irritating him by being especially frisky, running around the yard and occasionally brushing up against the chair that Dad was painting. Pooch had just made a pass by the chair and Dad, with his brush dripping with paint, reflexively took a swipe at Pooch with the brush. He missed him—well, most of him; he actually swiped Pooch from behind and right between his legs. Specifically, he painted Pooch’s more than ample testicles a bright yellow. Pooch jogged off oblivious and happy, his newly luminous endowments swinging from
side to side. Pooch always had the run of the neighborhood. Normally you could see him coming, but now you could
really
see him going from about a half mile away. My mother was apoplectic. First it was “What in the world is wrong with Pooch?”—thinking he had contracted some deadly disease. Then, when she was informed what had happened, it was “Fletcher, you have got to catch that dog.”

“Yeah, and then what?” he replied.

Good question. He did not want to be the one to try to apply the paint remover. There was only one thing for Mom to do. Since Pooch was well known in the neighborhood as “the Thompson dog,” she would not show her face until “that stuff wore off.”

I, of course, thought it was the neatest thing to have everybody talking about my dog. Dad acted like he was chagrined just like Mom, but later I wondered if the paintbrush incident had really been an accident. All I know is that a few years later, when the movie came out about a boy and his dog named “Old Yeller,” it had a special meaning for me.

F
OR ME, A GREAT DAY
was getting to go to what we called “the show”—that is, the Crockett Theater (down the street from the Crockett Gas Station, across from the Crockett Beauty Salon, and on the way to the Crockett State Park). Built when I was eight or nine years old, it was the most impressive structure in town—a huge, shadowy palace with large ovals along the walls concealing indirect purple lighting, muted and surreal. There was a large curtain drawn across the giant screen, enhancing the anticipation as to what lay behind it. It was a place of wonder, a spark to any imagination, and the home of heroes where good and evil were unambiguous.

Good guys looked and dressed the part, were strong, brave, took up for the little guy, won against all odds, and apparently never had to make a living. Any little boy who didn’t want to grow up to be like Roy Rogers or Gene Autry would have been cause for serious concern by his parents. At
twenty cents to get in and a nickel for popcorn, it was the ultimate entertainment for me until I was grown. There, I lived in a state of suspended disbelief for as long as I possibly could, knowing that what was playing out on the screen before me was make-believe but resisting the acceptance of that fact until I absolutely had to go home. I wanted it to be real. Tarzan, the cavalry, and the occasional adult adventure that I would see with my parents took me to places I wanted to go to and usually made me feel good about myself. The impact that these radio-singers-turned-cowboy-actors made on me was profound.

Many years later, when I was in the United States Senate and attending a hearing, we were talking about how violence in the movies and television had increased over the years. I made a passing reference to growing up with Gene and Roy and watching them shoot a lot of bad guys. Soon I received a long letter from a Gene Autry–related organization taking umbrage and expressing outrage over my statement. They pointed out that Gene always shot the gun at the bad guy’s hand. He never actually shot anybody. I stood corrected.

In those days, movies were perhaps the most significant common denominator in American society. If you walked into a bank almost anywhere in America, there was one thing you could almost always count on that would be shared by the bank president and the custodian: They grew up
watching the same movies. At least for a while in our society, it helped to promote social cohesion—a common understanding as to what was just and unjust, good and evil. We all had the same examples of heroism and villainy.